There are several cultural differences in the way humans communicate, both in verbal and non-verbal communication. Research on creating agents that are able to simulate such differences is currently growing, in part for their potential use in designing Virtual Learning Environments for intercultural training. In this paper we analyse a particular aspect of communication that has not yet received much attention in culture-specific agents, which is the verbal style used. Using our current cultural agent architecture, a small scenario was created where the verbal style employed by the agents depends on their cultural parametri-sation. With the scenario created, an experiment was conducted where users did perceive differences between two cultural versions of the agents.

This paper provides an overview of ongoing research on cultural and emotional learning, thereby utilizing engaging roleplay with synthetic characters. The paper explains the underlying learning objectives and provides an overview of how we intend to achieve them. This includes a technical framework integrating affective AI characters and innovative interaction technologies. The framework will be used to realize a virtual learning environment hosting the synthetic characters. Finally a brief description of an evaluation approach for the anticipated learning objectives is given.